Connor Merlyn, 18- District Five male

Before all the parade craziness started, I got to go to my room and put my stuff away, not that I really had any stuff. Really it was more of that I at least got to see my room and the outer Five lounge that my room and Gigi's were connected to. I couldn't say I cared for the decoration. Some of it was weird garish modern stuff, but then the same rooms would also have parts that were all bare metal and stark corners. I didn't even know what to call it. Brutalist, maybe, I barely remembered the word from some snobby art class I took. It looked like the builders wanted everyone to say how awesome they were, but at the same time didn't want anyone to enjoy being there. It was silly I was thinking about architecture when I was about to probably die, but I guess I wanted to distract myself.

After using the bathroom and taking a quick shower, I came back out into the lounge and noticed something. There was a blue envelope on the ground right inside the door to the larger room. I picked it up and opened it.

You're dead, Fives!- Four It said, with a heart over the "i" in "fives" and a smiley face after the "four".

Well that's creepy, I thought. It must have been from Ceto or Anthony, obviously. Why would one of them have it out for us, at least any more than any Tribute had it out for any other Tribute? I'd never even seen either of them before, of course. I only knew their names because the televisions in the trains had been constantly blaring Games stuff. I waited until my mentor Sol came in and showed him the letter.

"I'm not sure either," he said after he read it. "Let me do some asking around. Hopefully I'll be back here before the stylists come to shear you- I mean, to style you."

I was in the lounge chatting with Gigi when he came back. I'd shown her the letter, and of course she also wanted to know what it was about. She seemed like a nice normal person. It was too bad she was stuck here with me.

"Okay, good news and bad news." Sol said when he came back in. "Good news is I found out what this is all about. Bad news is it's exactly what it looks like."

"What is it?" Gigi asked.

"It's from Ceto." Sol said. "I did some snooping and turns out her uncle was a Peacekeeper who was killed in a riot in Five. Now she hates everyone from Five so lucky you."

"She wants to kill us because someone I don't even know killed her uncle?" I asked. I barely even remembered the riot it must have been- I was six years old and it happened halfway across the District. "This is some bullshit!"

"It definitely is," Gigi agreed. "What do we do?"

Sol shrugged. "I'm really sorry, you two. Truth is I never even crossed paths with the Careers in my Games. They died earlier than usual in a cholera outbreak. My best advice is just to lie low and hope something else gets her, I guess."

"Maybe she'll just kill one of us and that will be enough for her," Gigi joked darkly. "Dibs on not getting killed."

I cracked up into a big nervous laugh. I was stuck in the Hunger Games with twenty-three other kids and only one survivor. A Career had it out for me because of something I didn't even do. Apparently the stylists were going to treat me like an animal. My mentor didn't know what to do. And I couldn't even hope to be spared because my District partner already called dibs.

RJ Macready, 16, District Six male

I was excited to meet my stylists, weirdly. I was suspicuous of anyone from the Capitol, since they were all complicit in the Games, but I had a feeling that the stylists would be some of the most innocent. They were probably nice happy people who just liked making things pretty. I wasn't looking forward to the crazy Capitol looks they thought were "pretty" but at least they were trying.

"Hi, I'm Luno," a dark-skinned man with bright silver eyes and a white Afro said as the other stylists started gathering around. "I'm your head stylist."

As he said it I felt a pair of hands at my crotch. I looked down in horror as a woman started undoing my buttons.

"Hey, what are you doing?" I asked.

"We have to see what we're working with, silly." she said, like it was normal. "All of it."

"I really don't want-" I started. Before I could wave them off, three stylists were casually taking off my clothes, chatting with each other about totally unrelated things. I gently disentangled myself, afraid I'd get in trouble if I got in their way, and backed against the wall.

"Okay, just- I'll do it myself, okay?" I asked. I slithered out of my clothes and stood there in my underwear, mortified and exposed.

"No, no, you gotta get naked," a purple-haired woman said.

"What? Why?" I asked. The half-dozen Capitolites around me all seemed so nice and... NORMAL, other then their ridiculous fashion. It all just seemed like a nightmare. You can't just pluck children from their homes and kill all but one of them, and then to add to it all you can't just strip them and humiliate them. And WHY? What reason was there for all of this? I didn't know why the world had to be like this.

"So we can see the hair situation we're dealing with," Luno said. "It's not a big deal."

"Hair situation? The hair situation is none of your business. Are people going to be looking at that?" I asked. Did they really parade children in front of everyone NAKED? I wanted to cry. I wanted to go back to my room and hide under the bed.

"Sometimes," Luno shrugged. "Usually we get to make better costumes than that, though."

"Even the twelve-year-olds?" I asked. Now I wanted to throw up instead of cry. The Capitol thought it was normal or even GOOD to take the clothes off children so adults could see them? I used to think the world was a hard place but could be good. The Capitol was determined to change my mind.

"I can't think of any off the top of my head from Six," Luno asked. "Usually it's Twelve or One, where they sometimes use coal or gold dust."

"This is wrong." I blurted it out before I realized how dangerous it was to say. But it was true. It was wrong what the Capitol was doing, and it would have been wrong if I hadn't spoken up.

"It's just the way it's always been," a rainbow-eyed man said with a casual handwave.

"We can get naked too if it makes you feel better." The purple-haired woman said. Her simple, honest smile showed me something. It WAS wrong what the Capitol was doing. Hundreds of children had been harassed and abused because of Capitol policies. But... it wasn't these people's faults. They'd been raised here. Many of them were young enough they didn't remember anything different. They didn't have any idea what they were doing. The purple lady's casual offer proved that. It didn't remove the pain the children went through but it did mean these people were victims in their own way as well. The Capitol damaged everything. Even its own people.

"No, it's okay," I said. I hooked my hand through my underpants and slid them down. There wasn't any way around it. All I could do was let these people do their jobs.

Martin Jackman, District Seven male (15)

I hadn't known there was so much wrong with me. I knew I wasn't as tall as I wanted to be and that my nose was kind of crooked and that my butt was weirdly not symmetrical, but it turned out that was just the tip of the iceberg. Once the stylists got ahold of me I found out I was really ugly. My eyes were too small, so they caked on a ton of makeup. My glasses were ugly, so they gave me "contact lenses" that itched and gave me really cool icy blue eyes but also made it so I could barely see. My teeth were too yellow, so they covered them with gross-tasting spray that made them perfectly white. My hair was unfashionable, so they put in some fancy curly swoop that I thought looked kind of nerdy but they insisted was very "in".

That was just my FACE. When they got to the rest of me I thought they were going to die. When Tallulah saw the mole on my neck she wrinkled her nose and went "Ewwww". Someone ran out and got a weird-looking gun made just for this purpose. They stuck it on the mole and I winced as it shot out a stream of freezing liquid so cold it burned me. They flicked the mole off like they were breaking a glass. I was glad it was gone and all, but I didn't know it was THAT ugly.

After THAT ordeal I found out body hair was "out". They stripped all my clothes off and had me lay inside a big tube-shaped machine. I was half-expecting it to burn all the hair off me or something horrible like that, but instead it just made a weird-pitched nose and my body started to vibrate a little. I felt a tickly feeling all over and then the stylists were brushing all my hair off everywhere but my head after it had somehow come loose. I'd never had hairless legs before. It was positively weird. I could feel the skin on my legs rubbing against itself whenever I walked. I felt like a peeled grape.

"Much better," I said, repeating it after one of the stylists said it. She looked up in surprise.

"Oh, sorry. I have Tourette's Syndrome, so sometimes I repeat things or move funny," I said.

The stylists looked at each other in admiration. "You must be really brave to deal with that," one said.

"It's just part of life," I said. My head jerked over to my shoulder. It had happened a few times since I met the stylists. They seemed to have assumed I was ticklish.

A few minutes later my mentor Cassia walked in. I kind of curled in on myself, feeling like I should cover up or something but at the same time remembering she'd mentored plenty of naked boys before. Boy, it sounds really weird saying it that way.

"Isn't he so much better now?" Tallulah said proudly, sweeping an arm towards me.

"And so brave, dealing with Trivette's Sydrome!" another stylist said.

"Well, pretending to, anyway," Cassia said.

"What?!" I asked.

She gave me a cynical look. "Look, kid, all Tributes go through medical scans during the styling process. Your brain scans came back totally clean. What a miraculous recovery."

I felt even more naked than before. The Capitol didn't just take away my body hair and my self-esteem, they took away a huge part of my identity. I crossed my arms over my chest.

"Is there anything ELSE wrong about me?!"

Archibald Pell, 13, District Eight male

I did not like the parade. It was very loud and everyone looked pretty stupid if you asked me. I wasn't trying to be a grumpy teenager or anything. It was just we all had to wear ridiculous costumes and ride these big garish chariots and everyone was clapping like we'd done something, when really we were just a bunch of kids forced to play dress-up.

Usually I liked to keep inside my own social circle and family. In the parade I couldn't help but notice all the people around me. There were the Careers, jockying for attention and mugging for the crowd. The people with sillier costumes, trying not to be seen. Unfortunately I was one of the people with the sillier costumes. It seemed the stylists had learned that sometimes new materials get tested on animals before we use them for human clothing. Somehow in their minds this had gotten warped to "District Eight uses lab rats". So what was my costume? A rat. I was a lab rat. Because that made sense for Eight. It definitely wouldn't have worked in Three. Eight was clearly the best District for a rat costume.

Well, this is just a lost cause. Might as well accept it and enjoy the view. I wonder what the other Districts are up to...

In all the chaos and noise of the parade I found myself looking at the other costumes to distract myself. Dionysus was standing around boredly in a generic Greek toga while Allure was experiencing what might be the greatest day of her life. She was wearing a gorgeous gray dress festooned in crystals and she was smiling and waving like she'd just been crowed queen. Nailah looked embarrassed in a weird leopard-woman outfit. Nero, wearing a classic Roman soldier outfit, was clearly enjoying his much more stylish look and kept teasingly meowing and batting at Nailah. Ceto and Anthony were wearing sexy sailor outfits. Anthony was trying to keep from having a full wardrobe malfunction. Ceto seemed less annoyed by her outfit than the fact that the Five chariot was right in front of her. I wasn't sure why she was so mad. It was just the order the chariots always went in.

The non-Careers were more of a mixed bag, since the Career outfits usually had a warlike theme running through them. Connor was dressed as a Tesla coil and Gigi was one of those forked lamps with the electricity running between them that you always see in horror movies. They were both looking dead ahead, clearly trying not to make eye contact with Ceto.

Porsche was wearing a generic race car outfit. RJ was wearing one of those car costumes where it's like a tiny car in front of and behind you and you're standing in the middle of it. Porsche seemed to be trying to convince RJ to let her climb on top of him since she was the driver. RJ seemed to be unconvinced.

Martin was a tree. Des' outfit was even lazier. She was just wearing a green suit. Martin seemed very twitchy and Des seemed to be enjoying all the hubbub.

I, as discussed before, was a rat. Just a big uncomfortable rat outfit with the cute ears and everything. Since Kjole was my District partner, she was... wearing a football uniform.

"Why do you get a way better outfit than me?" I whispered during the parade.

"I just said I really liked football and they all got super excited," she shrugged.

"They gave me this," I said.

"You should have said something," she said. I guess a squeaky (hah) wheel gets the grease.

I wasn't sure what Oberon was supposed to be. It was some old-timey formal outfit like a mobster. Based on the bottle he was holding I could only assume it was some sort of play on Nine making alcohol products. Maizie, meanwhile, got a cool wheat-colored dress and wheat braided into her hair. Oberon was awkwardly stiff but Maizie was having the time of her life.

Omar was wearing a fancy equest... horse-rider outfit. Bess was wearing a horse outfit. She gave him a look, waggled her eyebrows at him, and scooped him onto her back. She neighed and then cracked up laughing.

Culter had a green jumpsuit with vines on it and Soleil was dressed in a Mother Earth-looking white dress with plants and stuff. She started to climb out onto one of the horses but stopped when Cultur pulled her back and probably said something about her getting in trouble.

The Twelve pair was distracted when Morty, dressed as a stick of dynamite with no arm holes, fell over and almost rolled off the chariot. Samantha, wearing a military uniform for some reason, yanked him back onto the chariot as she called for help.

I mean... I guess I DIDN'T have the worst outfit...

Omar's outfit was so perfect I had to change Bess' LOL Also Archibald's POV is a bit longer because I also used him for a parade overview so much of his POV really isn't about him.